I won't repeat details that can be found in the man pages. The menu
allows you to know who's on the talk server, react to new users, reply to
talk requests, connect and disconnect, as well as output everything to a
file.

Suppose salt@www.munchies.org and
vinegar@www.munchies.org are chatting away. Suddenly
ketchup wants to join in and talk to
vinegar. Here's what vinegar will see:

All salt has to do is type ketchup to add
him to the conversation. Deleting a user is just as simple.

Setting Options Before Going Online with .ytalkrc

There are a number of useful options that give power and flexibility
to YTalk, but let's stick to the basics for the sake of brevity and
simplicity. Options may be set in the .ytalkrc file located
in your home directory. Otherwise, the system wide defaults are in
/usr/local/etc/ytalkrc. Here a typical
.ytalkrc:

################
# a user's window will scroll when he reaches the bottom
# instead of wrapping back around to the top.
turn scrolling on
# re-ring any user who does not respond to your
# invitation within 30 seconds.
turn rering on
# re-rings a user without asking permission.
turn prompt-rering off
# any word which would overextend the right margin will
# be automatically moved to the next line on your screen.
turn word-wrap on
# will add these users to your session
# automatically, without asking you for verification.
turn auto-import on
# will automatically accept any connection
# requested by another user and add
# them to your session. You will not be asked for verification.
turn auto-invite on
#################

Remember to look at the man page for further referencing.

Extra Tricks

One of the unfortunate aspects of your garden variety chat lines and
instant messaging systems is the inability to navigate up or down one or
more lines to retype a letter, word or phrase, much less copy and paste
something you may have said 10 minutes earlier. You are condemned to
retype. However, if salt@www.munchies.org were to use the
shell command and activate vi (or, my preference,
vim), he would have the control and versatility of this
powerful editor within YTalk. For the truly enterprising, you can't go
wrong using emacs; just think of all those horizontal and
vertical screens you can generate.

Most of my explorations were involved figuring out YTalk but there was
a lot I could have done with SSH. We could have set up public key
authentication, for example, but remember it is only available on SSH
protocol version 2. A simple SSH contact would have resulted in an
immediate login without typing a password. This is great for the typing
handicapped among us.

Simplifying and securing the login process can be further enhanced by
restricting the login profile and default account shell--bash
in my case. Everybody can use the same account and when YTalk is
automatically invoked in the script it will look for certain terminals to
log into.

Conclusions

Are there limitations? YTalk works best when there are no more than 3
users. Why? Terminal size: the more people log in, the less space each
user receives. Are there nifty features that could be incorporated? The
X version of YTalk, although primitive, is going in the right direction.
Wouldn't it be great if somebody could look at the code and incorporate
X11 forwarding so as to allow graphical utilities to be tunneled through
it, say, xpaint? Now that I think of it SSH already has X11
port forwarding...